Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

In an interview with Wired, the founder of Swedish mobile technology company Anoto started to convey his company's vision by holding up a piece of paper.

This is the most advanced digital input screen ever developed. It has very high resolution, perfect contrast, and costs a fraction of a cent to produce. Any graphical interface can be printed on it, and you get years of full-time education, paid for by the government, to learn how to use it. It will not be beaten in our lifetime.

That article caught my interest in 2001 (can it really have been that long ago?) Since then Anoto's vision of a digital note-capturing device built into a pen that writes with ordinary ink on more or less ordinary paper has been licensed hither and yon, going through a number of hardware incarnations: the Ericsson ChatPen, the LeapFrog Fly Pentop Computer, the Logitech io2 Digital Writing System, and the Nokia Digital Pen are the ones I know of. I came close once to buying the Logitech pen, which wasn't as chubby and clumsy looking as some of its predecessors. But just when I was about to jump I bought a Tablet PC instead, hoping I'd be able to use it for digitizing my note-taking habit and possibly as a new development platform to target. The tablet made a perfectly serviceable laptop, but after trying the pen input under real-world writing conditions I quickly gave up on using it for digital ink. It forced me to bear down uncomfortably, made my already messy scribbling look even worse, sent infuriating stray marks zipping across the screen and generally never let me focus on my thoughts instead of the technology I was using.

I was hoping that Palm's new device would be my digital ink salvation (it was not). But on the same day that the Palm Foleo was announced, the former CEO of LeapFrog announced the latest offspring of the Anoto technology: a product called the Livescribe Smartpen. And from a distance it looks more promising than its intriguing predecessors.

Check out the "sneak peak" of how a student could use the Smartpen and see if a light goes on for you. You can also see part of a live demo from the All Things Digital conference where the product was introduced. This response from a journalist who had the chance to see the Smartpen in action gives more detail about its planned future, including WiFi connectivity.

What I like about Livescribe:

• The synchronization of ink and voice capture is inspired. To be able to tap a word you wrote on a page and have the pen play back the audio from the moment that word was written—absolutely awesome!
• 100 hrs of storage in an enclosure that's finally not freakishly larger than a normal pen
• The price is right, but just barely: sub-$200
• Livescribe seems to be serious when they call this a "new mobile platform": they are planning to release all kinds of developer tools for creating applications

Some things that I'm not so keen on but I think I could now live with:

• The Smartpen requires paper that has been printed with a fine grid of dots to keep itself oriented to everything on the page. Fortunately, their web site states that you can now print up your own "on certified home or business printers," so they're not trying to make paper into a profit center. But it does mean you'll be carrying a pad of paper around everywhere (which I do anyway).
• The pen is still a bit chubby
• No way around it: the recorded audio is going to pick up the sound of the pen tip moving on the paper
• Would I lose it like I lose all my other pens? Probably. On the other hand, I never lose my car keys because I'm intensely conscious of their value (after all, they've got 4GB of precious data hanging off them!)
• The character recognition probably isn't great, but for what I have in mind (recording all my notes as ink) any words or phrases the software can make out would be good enough to make a decent searchable index of my notes

The pen has a one-line digital display on it that reminds me of a Palm OS concept device I once worked up for my own amusement. The idea there was another kind of "mobile companion" product where you could click a button on the side of the pen then jot down an appointment, contact, task or note that you wanted to sync to your smartphone via an integrated Bluetooth radio. The Livescribe pen doesn't seem to have any hardware buttons, but perhaps it can be trained to recognize handwritten symbols that would signal it to interpret the text that followed as a particular data type. Could be fun and useful!

The Onion offers up a surprisingly "in-depth" comparative review of the Palm Treo 680, BlackBerry Curve 8300, and what must be the first Apple iPhone that has made it into the hands of the technical media. Well, flippers, actually. Must read for anyone giving serious thought to the fundamental usability issues that are preventing broad adoption of smartphones.

Read it and weep.

I'm totally hooked on a handheld mobile gadget that rarely leaves my home and I'm wondering how many other people are having the same experience. My Nokia N800 Internet Tablet gets heavy use at home in ways that have come as quite a surprise to me.

• My wife and I are buying a new home with it. I'm not exaggerating here. The N800 has turned out to be the perfect device for something we call pillow surfing: browsing Internet sites with your spouse or significant other while snuggled together in bed. The N800's small size, amazing screen resolution and desktop quality browser make reading the news together a thoroughly pleasurable experience and we do a fair amount of that with the help of its no-frills RSS reader. But where it's really shined for us is on Realtor.com and Google Maps. Most of our house-shopping happens in the early morning with coffee in bed or in the evenings before we go to sleep. The ease of flipping between 8 or 10 browser windows open to various MLS listings, "Featured Tours" and map locations has made the Internet Tablet our primary home shopping tool. An indication of the N800's stability and multitasking capability is that we just reviewed a property that's been continuously open in one of those browser windows since last Saturday. Terry has little patience for my gadgets and the laptop is strictly off-limits from the bedroom, but the little tablet has become a welcome way of sharing the Internet in bed. Aside from the great screen, browser and multitasking, this gadget fits perfectly on the nightstand when you go to sleep. It has completely supplanted my Treo there, thanks also to the pleasant-sounding alarm clock feature.
• Ambient email. Handling email has always been a matter of delicate balance for me. As an entrepreneur I need to be available and responsive, but as a developer I need to keep the tendency to be distracted by email in check. Email clients that pop up a notification with incoming mail hurt my productivity, but these days some people wonder what's up with you if you don't respond to mail within an hour or two. I once tried keeping a laptop as a dedicated email machine off to the side of my development workstation to keep my Inbox at hand but just out of my field of vision. It didn't really work. But the N800 turns out to strike just the right balance on my desk. It stands up on its kickstand and has a special icon that glows in brighter colors when you have something in your Inbox—a reminder that is enough that I don't forget to check my mail, but not so intrusive that I check it compulsively. If it's a day when I'm doing a lot of email back-and-forth I keep the tablet's mail client open so I can see the state of the conversation at a glance. The small size and lack of connection to my PC keyboard keeps me from getting distracted and writing a lot of mail that I don't need to. I only launch my desktop email client when I've made a conscious decision to do email—usually about once every couple of hours. This has been an unexpected boon to my productivity.
• E-Reading. A lot of my reading material is digital: in addition to work-related blogs and tech sites I read a lot of white papers and design docs, as well as the occasional RFP or contract, usually in PDF format. I find being able to get away from my desk and settle into a comfortable chair to do a lot of this reading makes it much more enjoyable. That's especially helpful to my work if what I'm reading is something tedious that I have to get through but might otherwise procrastinate. The built-in PDF reader in the N800 is very good, especially because the hardware buttons for zooming in and out are so easy to use. Zooming is one of the best features of this device and is used a lot while pillow-surfing too. Anther thing I read a lot of is source code. Sounds boring I know, but it's not just part of my job, it also satisfies my compulsion to learn how software works and how I can improve my own development. Since most of the code I want to read is in my development environment, I used to have to be at my PC or crack open a laptop to do this. With the N800 I just fire up the VNC viewer, connect to my PC and my IDE is fully available to me while I'm lying on the couch or in my easy chair. I never have to sync stuff over to the device this way. This gives me most of the code navigation features and all the syntax highlighting to make reading code a comfortable and productive experience, even within large projects with hundreds of files (Eclipse's code browsing perspective helps here).

I could tick off a number of features or applications that I miss in the N800 (a good note-taking application would be at the top of the list) but what I'm trying to point out here is this: the features that work well on this little tablet make great experiences that have never been possible for me on other mobile devices. I don't care in the least that I don't have PIM applications, a cellular radio, or a built-in keyboard for this baby. I can't even bring myself to be too upset that Cingular blocks me from tethering it to my phone over Bluetooth so I can use it when I'm out of the house. Just the way it is it makes my life better in no small way and that's all I can ask for in a mobile device.

(...or why the closed-platform iPhone could usher in a renaissance of open-platform handheld tablets)

Updated Jan 21, 2007

I had kind of an amusing reaction when I got the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet in my hand at the end of a week dominated by the iPhone announcement and discussion. As I opened the box and was greeted by the N800's expansive screen and long, sleek lines my first thought was "wow... it looks kind of like an iPhone." My second thought: "Wasn't it just last week that I thought it looked like a PDA?" Powerful stuff, that Apple koolaid!

I wrote a few days ago about my concern that the iPhone would be a setback for mobile computing due to Apple's apparent unwillingness to let users customize it with software of their choosing. On further thought I'm less concerned. As competitors who don't share Apple's controlling instinct roll out more tablet-style phones of their own I wonder if the end result might actually be favorable for the growth of mobile application use. Whether or not a mobile phone with almost no hardware buttons turns out to be practical for the smartphone set, it's suddenly become cool in the imagination of the general public. In my experience, users of tablet-form PDAs install more software than users of smartphones running the same operating systems. While part of this may be that the customers who buy smartphones tend to be focused mainly on voice and email, another factor may very well be that expanded screen real estate makes application use a much more inviting experience. The iPhone may not be open for third party apps, but many of its less costly imitators surely will. Likewise, the tablet-style iPhone may not be ideal as a phone and messaging device, but it will sell anyway and inspire users about other possibilities for handheld computers.

In just a couple of days with the N800 tablet I've rediscovered the world of difference that 4 inches of high-resolution screen makes for application usability. The browsing experience is absolutely breathtaking: fast, full-page, zoomable viewing with Javascript, CSS, Flash, pretty much the works. Reading e-books is miles beyond anything I've experienced with a handheld device. I was even surprised to find that typing out emails with my thumbs on the big onscreen keyboard was a bit faster and about as accurate as using the keyboard on the Treo or its various knock-offs, despite the absence of tactile feedback. While Nokia's lovely tablet still lacks some needed UI refinements (especially lined up against the iPhone) its magnificent screen, Internet-optimized software and handy kickstand makes even fairly long sessions of surfing, reading, writing, or video-chatting a far more relaxing and pleasurable experience than I recall having on a smartphone. The iPhone isn't going to be able to deliver quite this screen improvement (yet!), having less than half the N800's screen resolution and 2/3 the pixel density, but its QVGA screen and apparently brilliant software are still compelling invitations to use the phone to the fullest of its capabilities. When tablet-style iPhone clones with open operating systems hit the market we may see the mobile application light start to come on in numbers that we've not seen among Moto Q and Palm Treo users. The vision that the UMPC and the Newton failed to deliver stands a chance of finally being understood by the masses.


Where I hope this all leads

What neither PDAs nor smartphones have really been able to do very well is help you keep all your valuable data, media and applications on your person all the time. Laptops, thumbdrives and web applications have all tried to fill this need, each with gaps or compromises. Another pain point that none of these mobile solutions has adequately answered is the need that many people have for taking and managing handwritten notes. Looking at the N800, which wasn't really intended to answer these problems, I can see that with the right software it could be closer than anything we've seen to date for solving them:

• It's pocketable and lightweight, so you wouldn't mind carrying it with you just about anywhere
• It runs all day on a charge, even while continuously connected to a WiFi network (which came as a big surprise to me)
• It has two SD card slots, both of which appear as removable drives when connected to a PC by USB or Bluetooth. Today that means up to 16GB of solid state storage accessible by both device and PC.
• It has an open operating system capable of running apps with desktop-like capabilities
• It has a screen big enough for those applications to be a pleasure to use. Also big enough for reasonable note-taking using electronic ink (maybe—could actually be a bit bigger, but some will accept this compromise for the pocketability)
• It pairs nicely with your Bluetooth phone when you don't have WiFi available and really need access to the network
• It's under $400—without a contract!

All that's missing are mobile and desktop companion applications (email, office doc, PIM, browser, RSS reader) that can share the mass storage on the device: the mobile version running on the device processor and screen, the desktop version running on the PC processor and screen when the device is connected to it.

If Nokia can get this close to solving the pressing need for an always-on-you personal computing environment without even really trying, how far off can we be from someone integrating the software that brings it all together? While the N800 is unlikely of itself to break out of its targeted niche and start a mobile revolution, the iPhone is another story. Despite the flaw of its closed design and protests from Jobs that the iPhone is not a computer, I've come around to thinking that it will play an indirect but important role in shaping the mobile computing vision in the public imagination.

In short, I'm watching for this chain of events:

closed iPhone --> touchscreen fashion --> open-platform competition --> new tablet device categories (finally) catch on

That would have been a good name for Nokia's new N800 Internet Tablet. I've owned it for less than 24 hours and it's already quite clear that it is for an Internet addict what a hip flask is to an alcoholic.

I almost think this was on Nokia's mind when they redesigned this product. The enclosure bears an uncanny resemblance in shape, size and finish of the classic silver hip flask.

«gulp» ... «ahhh»

...and my Internet flask slips silently back into my pocket as my wife steps into the room. ;-)

So many things to say about the iPhone. I'll try to stick with a few that haven't been said over and over elsewhere.

First observation: the touchscreen interface has its new poster child. I wrote six months ago that

If touchscreen devices do take off as Strategy Analytics predict, I contend it will happen because they offer the first really discoverable and fun user interfaces for mobile phones. Stylus input needn't be a watered down version of mousing on a PC: it can and should be an experience that is a great improvement over the PC experience.

Apple seems to have been of the same mind. With the wrinkle that they want to liberate us from the stylus too. I said last July that we should "think Minority Report" when we think about the touchscreen and the iPhone's gestural interface is the kind of thing I was getting at. Aside from not having to use the stylus, which is a beautiful thing, I can't tell yet if they've really improved touchscreen usability in the practical sense of getting things done faster and easier. But it sure looks like you're going to be having more fun.

While Apple is working out their exclusive deals with this carrier and that, expect others to roll out media-centric phones with big touchscreens now. Even though those have been only for geeks in the past. That's what we mean when we talk about something becoming an "icon" and this device is about as iconic as they come. A touchstone (almost literally) that others will certainly reference in their own designs.

The iPhone means mobile devices will be less Bill Gates, more Isaac Newton from here on out. The mobile phone is finally waking up to the fact that it's quite a different kind of personal computer: one that not only moves through space, but reacts to the myriad physical forces and conditions it finds there by turning them into input. It knows about movement toward and away from things like your face; It knows up from down; it knows light from dark; it understands the velocity of things that come into contact with it, like the flick of your finger, and its graphical interface responds in ways we'd expect a physical object to react under such a force. All this will raise our expectations about what our mobile devices should know and understand about both the physical environment and our human intentions. That's a really important advancement.

At the same time I wonder if Apple didn't get so carried away with revolutionizing the user interface that they forgot what revolutionaries so often forget: people have ingrained expectations and habits that don't always conform well with sweeping change. Expectations like being able to feel the contour of the call button without taking your eyes off the road, and experiencing its tactile click under your fingers. Habits like blazingly fast text-entry skills using a thumbboard or (outside the US) a 12-key pad. There's something beyond the mere absence of style to the fact that PDA-centric phones that substitute screen taps for buttons have mainly been attractive to geeks. A little more serious attention to haptics would have served the iPhone well. When reviews start to come in I wonder if Jobs' 10 million iPhones in 2008 prediction won't be far wide of the mark.

Still, can there be any question that the iPhone will be the new standard against which every new smartphone will be compared—fairly or otherwise?

Therein lies a problem that could actually set advancements in mobile computing back a few years. If like me (and the folks at Palm whose motto I'm ripping off) you think the future of computing is mobile computing, you probably see the iPhone as the future deferred. There is nothing about it that is going to impress this vision on the masses. The vision is one that sees software as the ultimate means for personalizing our mobile technology, and there was a deafening silence on the subject of developers, developer programs, SDKs or third party software during Steve Jobs' keynote. Instead, Jobs waved the question of installing software off with the vague statement that "it's OSX," which every developer knows is some place between a gross exaggeration and an outright lie. The operating system may have many shared components and APIs with OSX, but if these aren't documented and supported the system is not open and users will not be able to install anything but music, videos, ringtones and stock tickers. If the iPhone was something that Apple hoped would attract a developer ecosystem it would have been mentioned at some point during the 2 1/2 hour presentation. Instead the message was: "everything people need to do with the iPhone we've thought of ourselves." At least one analyst reports that this is precisely Apple's intention. Update: Jobs has now confirmed this himself.

This makes the iPhone a bit of a siren in the Odyssean sense of the word: a lovely, irresistably appealing thing that threatens to bring progress toward the mobile computing Ithaca to a halt. Where imitations of the Treo ushered in a new generation of smartphone users, the iPhone and its inevitable imitators may mean a few more years of the feature phone era.

There is hope for developers and the mobile pilgrims who have seen the light of a rich application ecosystem. Palm, the company that best embodies the spirit of mobile computing, has let slip that this is the year when it raises the curtain on a third act: a new kind of device that is not a PDA or a Treo, but that addresses a need that has yet to be satisfied by either. It's going to have to be good to grab attention away from the iPhone, and Mike Mace summed it up well with this:

I don't know if Palm wanted to make Jeff Hawkins' new product a test of the company's ability to innovate, but like it or not that product is going to be compared intensely to the iPhone, even if they don't attack the same problems or sell to the same people. It's Jeff Hawkins vs. Steve Jobs for the title of mobile visionary.

That should be entertaining.

It should indeed!

Update: After some further thought I'm less concerned about the effect that the iPhone might have on the mobile software market. It might even be a positive, over all. Here's why.

ARCChart has joined the bandwagon predicting that touchscreens are about to become the next big thing in mobile input technology. Yesterday they published an article titled "Keypad makes way for control surfaces," where they forecast that the mechanical buttons that festoon our phones these days are about to beat a hasty retreat in favor of soft interfaces where all the controls of the device display on a touch-sensitive screen. Stuff like this:


Slick!

Literally, slick. You can see the attraction with your eyes, but what about tactile feedback?

Of course, phones that use a touchscreen as the primary input are nothing new, though they seem for now to be aimed mainly at the power-geeks who want an über-smartphone that's more PDA than phone. I used a PDA-phone like this from 2000-2003 and was pleased with the experience. But (believe it or not) it was the first mobile phone I ever owned, so everything about it seemed new and cool. And it wasn't a phone that was popular with more than a handful of other geeks. If you are a regular you may have guessed the model. It was the Handspring VisorPhone!


I still love touchscreen devices, but as I spend more time using lots of modern smartphones I wonder if my conflicting desire for a tactile response from my personal devices isn't more indicative of the general user population. If anything, I find myself grumbling that my phones don't have enough buttons to activate common features that I want within easy click-range. Think how many times you've read the expression "satisfying click" in a review of a personal device and you start to realize how fundamental this aspect is in an input device.

The study of the touch-response from tools and devices is called haptics and it's an area of research that phone designers will need to explore to make these cool interfaces satisfy the sense of touch. I suspect we're a long way from having machine interfaces that can dynamically simulate the contours of various button displays from a flat surface. But simulating the clicking sensation, or at least a slight thump, when depressing a virtual button on a touchscreen would be a relatively simple mechanical problem. A tiny actuator that swung a pendulum-like cam against a hard stop would probably produce the sound and sensation of a clicking button fairly well. It's a simple enough thing to try that a hobbyist could experiment with it. What about it Matt Hamrick? And Ron, if you can get me one of these from Taiwan, I may disassemble the buttonless blob of a phone and experiment with it myself.

Mike Mace created some buzz a few weeks ago when he blogged the following:

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, gave a talk this morning. Afterward I asked him if we'll see next year the secret project that Jeff Hawkins has been working on. "Yes," he said, and moved immediately to another question.

I pinged him this morning to see if he could say anything else about the talk he heard, writing "I realize that Colligan probably didn't have anything else to say about their still-secret project," to which he replied:

Nope, but I have a tidbit for you. I was talking to someone who supposedly knows someone who knows stuff, and I mentioned the Hawkins project.

"Is that different from the Linux tablet they're doing?" this person said.

If I had to guess today, based on the very fragmentary hints I've heard, I'd expect:

--Something slightly larger than a handheld.

--WiFi based.

--A large amount of local storage.

--Syncs with, and acts as a light client to, your PC (and perhaps also a data store on the Web).

The key thing I don't know is what specific problems the device would be designed to solve. The rumors I've heard so far are more focused on hardware features. The "zen" is in the solution.

Well, he's right about that. As much of a mobile computing enthusiast as I am, and as much as I've seen how the technology can have a huge impact on how my clients are able to conduct business, I personally remain stubbornly dissatisfied with every device I've tried out there. Various smartphones and PDAs have tantalized me with the possibility of getting all my "stuff" under control and on my person, but as much as I like them they don't really help me with the fundamental problem. The best description of what I need is the "Info Pad" idea that Mike floated back in the Spring. But no one has really developed a device close enough to the Info Pad for me to put my whole life onto it and have it work. It's just amazing to me, because I know so many people that are in the same boat.

Last night I ran across an amusing article that C|Net published back in July that highlighted how little the major players in the mobile device market have learned about what different people really need from their mobile technology. It was a face-off between the Samsung Q1 UMPC and—get this—the Apple Newton MessageBook 2000.

The 10-year-old Newton won the match.

I suffer daily—literally, physically suffer—for the lack of a device that helps me keep everything in my life together, accessible, and on my person: email, handwritten notes, whiteboards, reams of articles, projects, drawings, diagrams and docs that are spread across multiple PCs, desks, bags, and file cabinets in three different offices across two different states. I'm dying here, and I am praying for someone to deliver me from this hell.

What Mike Mace describes gives me hope that Palm could be the one.

In response to my "Build your own smartphone" piece I was pinged by Matt Hamrick (by day an engineer at PalmSource sorry, ACCESS) who pointed me to a group of Silicon Valley mobile geeks who aren't waiting around for someone to give them the opportunity. They're building their own handsets right now using off-the-shelf parts from GumStix, SparkFun Electronics, and EarthLCD plus software compliments of the Linux community and their own ingenuity. The group, of which Matt's a member, is the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club and it sounds like they have been making rapid strides toward developing some nice smartphones that emphasize mobile data as well as voice. Matt says two of the handsets they're working on are very much like the design I posted in "Build your own smartphone."

Every so often over the last year I've been out to the GumStix site, oogled their "Waysmall" gum-stick sized embedded Linux devices, wondered about how I'd hook up a GSM radio, and dreamed about doing what these guys are doing. That's my idea of a hobby, let me tell you.

But it's hard to have a hobby when you're building a business, dammit. You feel lucky to get an evening with your wife or friends sometimes. Nevertheless, Matt indicates that the club is working on making it easier to tinker by "releasing" some hardware that takes the soldering out of the process and lets developers get right down to working on software. I actually love soldering things up, but given my time constraints I'm going to be very interested in seeing those kits when they're ready. Just don't say anything to my wife about this! ;-)

The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club got a nice write-up in the Dec issue of Wired which you can read online. If you're interested in learning more or getting involved in the project hbmobile.org is the place to start.

Update: As Matt points out in the comment below a lot of great work is being done on open source mobile phone hardware at opencellphone.org, so be sure to check those guys out, too.

About once a year I cave in and indulge the slightly narcissistic urge to draw up a design for a mobile device that I think someone should be selling. I say narcissistic because such exercises almost invariably end up being about what you would buy, not what would be attractive in a broad enough market for the product to be viable. Mobile computers and smartphones differ from any other computer that's ever existed in that they are so personal in every sense of that word. Everyone needs something a little different. Even so, it's fun to think about what kind of product you would want to release if you were the product manager for a company like Palm, Nokia, RIM or HTC.

One thing I'd be thinking a lot about is how to move mobile devices— especially the high-end, high-margin smartphones—in an even more personal direction. I believe we're a long way from knowing what market segments exist—or could be created—for smartphones. That's one reason that the market has not taken off quite as quickly as many analysts predicted. It seems to me that everyone keeps repeating the mantra that "personalization is the killer app" and then seems slightly stumped that most of the personalization that really interests people has been at the low end of mobile phone functionality: ringtones, callback tones, wallpapers and the like. Why aren't the much greater personalization opportunities afforded by third party applications driving consumer interest in smartphones the way they did for PDAs five years ago?

There are a lot of reasons, but one that I haven't heard anyone mention is that smartphone hardware is less customizable today than PDA hardware was five years ago. Back in 2000 when I got my first PDA the hot device was the Handspring Visor, which had a wonderful expansion port called the Springboard slot. Dozens of third party hardware companies produced Springboard modules that enabled you to turn your Visor into a digital camera, a serviceable smartphone, an MP3 player, a WiFi-enabled war-driving machine, a GPS navigator, a barcode scanner, a mass storage device, or what have you. The Springboard phenomenon was so successful that hardware companies invested in products that today seem almost ridiculously niche: $400 modules designed to improve your golf game, personal massagers, and medical modules to deliver timed dosages of insulin to users that are diabetic. At the peak of the PDA phenomenon there must have been 30-40 modules available and they made the Visor addictively customizable.

Handspring was among the first mobile computing companies to foresee that stand-alone PDAs would quickly be outmoded by mobile "communicators" with cellular radios and they can hardly be blamed for turning their focus away from the Visor line and toward the new Treo. But one of the unfortunate casualties of that transition was that they weren't able to carry over the vision of user-customizable hardware.

If I were Palm's product manager, restoring that vision would be one of my top priorities. As nice as the Treo is for people that want to stay on top of all their communication channels while they are mobile, it suffers from the same problem that all smartphones do today: the design decisions of what to optimize and what to compromise, no matter how well-conceived, are baked permanently into the device. This deprives customers the chance to make many of their own decisions about what mobile computing uses are most important to them. Or even to morph their device to suit the occasion: business trip, vacation, morning trail run, moving around the WiFi-enabled office or college campus, surfing on the couch.

Modularize so users can "build their own" smartphone

I should be able to decide myself that having 4 gigs of storage or a WiFi adapter is more important to me right now than a camera, for instance. The camera, the memory and the WiFi adapter should all be modules that pop in and out of my phone as easily as changing the battery. Instead of releasing one new Treo at a time, Palm should release four or six of them—all the same base unit but with different modules orienting the device toward different market segments. Standardize the form factor and interface (SDIO would be a good choice) and watch the module ecosystem grow your loyal customer base. Nokia had to build a complete handset to provide functionality for runners and athletes—the kind of niche product that only a company the size of Nokia could risk. With a modular system like this a smaller vendor like Palm would only have to release a module with an accelerometer and GPS that would pop into its base smartphone. Or let a third party assume the risk of building the module and bundle it after you know there's a good segment for it.

Don't compromise on the physical interface

There's another baked-in compromise found in most smartphones today that I'd want to eliminate, at least for the high-end models: stop forcing people to use the same physical interface to make and receive voice calls as they do to send an email or browse the web.

Ever since the BlackBerry took off, there's been a distinct trend toward replacing the 12-key dialing pad with a tiny QWERTY keyboard. That's great for entering text, but lousy for dialing a phone number—or even speed-dialing while your eyes are on the road. Voice is still the primary function of a smartphone, so if you want to expand the smartphone market you shouldn't be sacrificing the voice calling experience to add other functionality. Nokia came up with the right answer with their 9000 series Communicators: a clamshell design with a standard phone keypad on the outside and a full keyboard (and larger screen) on the inside. This form factor has come a long way from the day when it was referred to as "The Brick" but the current models are still a bit too big and boxy to appeal to anyone but a business user or gadget freak. And they lack touchscreens, which simplify the use of complex applications enormously. What I have in mind for my ideal smartphone is something more like this, which is kind of a cross between a Nokia 9300 and a Samsung SPH-i500:



Viewed from the side and back you can see the modular influence of the Handspring Visor:



If this handset looks a little chunky for a "dream machine," consider that it's still quite a bit smaller than the year-old Nokia 9300, which similarly packs in two keying systems and two screens.


Given that we are adding a module system and a touchscreen digitizer to the interior screen, I may actually be pushing beyond the envelope of what can feasibly (or economically) be done in the way of miniaturization. Clearly, small size is a big factor in smartphone adoption, especially among new users. But how long can it be before a "convertible" design like this can be realized with the slim profile that so many consumers expect today? I believe the company that achieves it will be the one that sees mass market consumers starting to drop the extra C-note for a smartphone and the carriers chipping in whatever difference is needed to make the deal go down. And my guess is they will subsidize a handset like this heavily: the roomier keyboard will deliver a text entry experience that even the Baby Boomers will enjoy and the near-VGA screen will make the web and streaming multimedia a pleasure—both use cases that drive demand for premium wireless data plans.

If this form factor and modular design catches on the way I think it would I'd expect to see platform and software developers experiment with interesting ways of using the wide aspect ratio inner screen. Imagine your list of selectable RSS feeds in a column on the left and a browser window on the right. Or a split view of a document that lets you see a whole page at a time. Or the ability to have two chat windows—or even two separate applications—share the screen. It's admittedly a bit of a geek dream, but flash a device like this on the screen during a couple of episodes of 24 or the next Mission Impossible movie and I suspect you'd bring out the inner geek in a lot of folks shopping for a new phone.

Or is that just me projecting my own particular brand of gadget lust on the masses? Probably. I don't care anymore. Someone just build this thing so I can buy it, ok?

Update: After posting this I was contacted by Matt Hamrick, who is part of a group that really is building their own smartphones from parts ordered online. Their hardware designs are being released under the Creative Commons License to encourage others to join in their "open source" hardware project and according to Matt a couple of the designs are a lot like my drawings above. Read about it in my followup post here.

I went into downtown Chicago yesterday evening to check out the new Nokia store (first of it's kind in the US) and see if I could get my hands on the E61 "NokiaBerry." It's been many years since I was last on the Michigan Avenue "Magnificent Mile" and I'd forgotten how strikingly beautiful downtown Chicago can be.

It had been a scorching hot day, but after the sun went down people came out in droves. The stores, cafes, and sidewalks were bustling. Boatloads of tourists were boarding and disembarking from the big tour boats that cruise the Chicago river a couple of blocks up from Nokia's new digs. That crane on the right hand side of the picture is the site of Donald Trump's latest real estate project.

The new store is smack in the middle of one of the swankiest and busiest shopping districts in the US but I was curious to see if Nokia was drawing enough walk-in customers to justify the astromical rent they pay on this ultra-prime retail space. I can't say whether they were making a lot of sales, but when I got there about an hour before closing time the showroom was packed to the point that it was somewhat difficult to get to the back of the store. I snapped the interior picture below just before leaving and most of the people had cleared out.

I'd already been in the Apple store two blocks up (reaction: I am now officially old) but as impressive as their huge solid glass staircase, super-modern decor, and uber-cool soundtrack were they didn't prepare me at all for the overwhelming sensory experience at Nokia. The entire store is paneled wall-to-wall, front-to-back in large video displays. The displays form unified images with huge graphics spanning their entire length and filling the room with intense color. I'd read somewhere that they also display information about the phones when you pick one off the shelf and pull it toward you, but I didn't see that. The atmosphere isn't frenetic (the colors don't flash at you and there's no music that I recall) but if it weren't for the large number of people in the store it would have made you feel you were a fish in Shedd aquarium down the street. I wonder if people stay long when they wander in during hours that aren't really busy.

So what about the E61? Well, at first it seemed that I wasn't going to get to see one. I'd assumed that part of the point of a store like this was to have all their models on display instead of just the ones people can find in the carrier stores. But apparently they've decided that giving people a bad case of the "I wants" over phones that haven't been released in the US yet only makes them angry, so there's nothing in the store that you can't get from a US wireless operator already. That's the official story and most of the salespeople stick to it.

I wasn't buying it, though. The E61 was made for the US market and has been available for some time in Europe. I could smell that it was in the room somewhere. I just had to find the person who would show it to me.

Come to find out most of the salespeople had been issued E61s a couple of months ago to use as their personal phones. After talking with two other reps, I finally convinced one guy to show me his and got to play around with it for a little while. I didn't get enough time to give a full and fair review of this smartphone, but I will say the following:

• It has a lovely slim form factor that's quite comfortable in the hand (not sharp and awkward feeling like a RAZR). It has a slight wedge shape, deeper at the top.
• The screen is beautiful and the orientation (like that of the Motorola Q) is right for a QVGA smartphone: they should be landscape for best viewing of documents and web pages.
• The keyboard is disappointing. It's true, this is coming from someone who doesn't care much for cramped thumbboards like the ones on the Treo and BlackBerry, so I'm negatively disposed from the start, but the E61 keys seem even closer together than the Treo's, wiggle disconcertingly, and have poor tactile feedback. As with the Treo, it's hard to do even basic stuff like dialing a number without watching what you're doing. But the E61 does have its compensations...
• It's got the best web browser I have ever seen on a mobile device. The browser that Nokia developed in partnership with Apple is truly the crown jewel of the S60 3rd Edition.
  • I found I liked seeing pages in a zoomed-out full-page view, and then zooming in on the part of the page where I see the content--not the banner, not the ads, not a huge column of links, the stuff I want to read.
  • I was pleasantly surprised with the usability of the "mouse" cursor that you move around the screen and click links with. If most web pages weren't so full of links you don't want to see, much less click, I'd prefer the old S60 browser method of cycling through the links sequentially, which is a less touchy operation than using a joystick and pointer. But I had to admit, the new desktop-like design is pretty well suited to the navigation challenges of the modern mobile Internet. I've used this pointer system on the S80 Nokia 9300, by the way, and the new S60 version is slightly better: the joystick is easier to control and can be used one-handed. It's not a perfect substitute for stylus navigation, but it's getting surprisingly close. (Note: only the browser has the pointer navigation)
  • I was also very impressed with the slick navigation through your browser history. It's killer to see your history as a series of thumbnails that you can quickly cycle through to return to a particular page without painfully retracing your steps. The fact that the feature looks really cool is beside the point that it's delightfully functional.
• Office applications (I mostly tried the word processor) seemed adequate, but this is where the absence of a touchscreen hurts a bit. If you're planning on editing documents very much I don't think you can beat the speed and intuition of selecting text with a stylus, moving it around the document, and applying formatting to it. I haven't spent enough time with either S80 or S60 3rd Edition to know if there are keyboard shortcuts to get around using menus when doing this kind of editing (I think S80 does have some) but if the E61 has stuff like 'Ctrl-X', 'Ctrl-V' etc. it could address some of these shortcomings relative to touchscreen smartphones. As has been the case in the past, you can lose formatting of complex documents in the built-in S60 office apps because they undergo a conversion when you open and resave them on the device. I understand that Docs to Go can fix that.
• A handy feature I learned about for roadwarriors who give presentations: you can pair the E61 with a Bluetooth-enabled projector (are there many of these?) and give your PowerPoint preso directly from the phone. That's the theory anyway. I've had enough trouble just using ordinary laptops with projectors that I'm not sure I'd trust it (unless I brought my own projector, and where's the mobile lifestyle in that?)

So when is it coming to the US? No one can say. You can of course go buy an unlocked one online, but you won't get any warranty support for it if you do. Not recommended. There's an interesting issue concerning release of smartphones with WiFi in the US. The folks at the store said definitively that no US operator will carry a WiFi enabled communicator like the 9300i because they don't have strategies in place to generate revenues from it. Sounds like typical wireless operator logic to me, but if it's true, why does everyone expect the E61 to come to the US? And it's not like the carriers don't carry Windows Mobile smartphones that offer WiFi. Still, they were adamant: we'll never see a 9300i here.

Too bad. While I liked the E61 a lot, I'm still most tempted by the staid 9300 with its roomy keyboard, 640-pixel-wide screen, and old-fashioned big-button exterior cellphone keypad and interface. Even without WiFi it would still be my pick among the various stellar smartphones we're starting to see from Nokia on this side of the pond. But if you need a smartphone and were thinking about picking up something like a Motorola Q, forget about that. The E61 is miles beyond the Q. It's certainly a formidable rival for the Treo 700. I'm not a Treo user, so I'll leave it to others to make that comparison.

Oh yeah, there's one other thing. I got to spend a little time in the Vertu section of the Nokia store, which is in a separate glassed in room at the back, and appointed like the Cartier showroom across the street. For those who don't know, a Vertu phone is to a Nokia what a Rolex is to a Timex: they are jewelry intended to impress. Despite myself, I was impressed with these handmade phones. But unless you need 4.2 carats of diamonds encrusted on your mobile phone I recommend passing over the Signature series and getting yourself an Ascent. They're clad in wonderful leather in the back, they have Bluetooth, which the Signature series do not, and they start at only $4,800--much less than the Signature phones which are (if I recall correctly) in the $6k-80k range. These have a wonderful heft to them and the construction reminded me of the heyday of gold pocketwatch making around the turn of the last century.

I had another conversation with the analyst I know who is close to Palm and occasionally gives me scoops on what's going on there. Among the items he could share from a conversation he had with Palm this week are the following:

• The Europe-destined Treo that a Morgan Stanley analyst said last September was codenamed "Hollywood" will be released in five markets by Vodafone in July of this year. Expect a big dog-and-pony show similar to what occurred here in the US with the 700w release. Whether or not this device lives up to the hype that has been whipped up since its existence was leaked back in November remains to be seen. Engadget said it was to be "a very thin 3G device," but all we know from a 7-month old report by Sagio Investments is that Palm planned to remove the ugly antenna stub and maybe make some other improvements of the styling to appeal to those fashion conscious Europeans. Previous conversations with my informant have led me to believe this phone will be the second Treo to run on Windows Mobile.
• No new word on the release date for the Palm OS Treo 700p, but I was forwarded the following comment by another analyst, who I'm assured is "good" but who I can't otherwise vouch for:

  Contacts tell us that the upcoming Treo 700p is a very exciting product because of the speed of the product, not only because of the EVDO radio, but because the OS has been tuned to work very efficiently. The carriers expect it to be a great seller.

  I don't usually put a lot of stock in what analysts or carriers "expect" but it's nice to know that there's some enthusiasm there.
• In regard to the speculation that the four models Palm planned to release this year would really be just one or two models released on multiple networks, my guy was clear that Palm only considers models to be distinct if they have distinct features like the OS, the radio, the specs, the form factor, etc. Having said that, I got the definite impression that Palm's mid-range plan is to make lots of incremental refinements and variations to the Treo and not so many big changes.
• There was a statement that I can't repeat verbatim but that gave me the distinct impression that the lower-end Treo that has been dubbed "Low Rider" might not be the fourth Treo Palm plans to release this year after all. Instead a model that sounds a lot like Low Rider is slated for 2007 now and the #4 Treo for this year (which is still confirmed) is sounding like it could be something else. I imagine that details will follow later.

As usual, I can't say anything more about my source and I expect all this to be filed as "rumor" and accorded the skepticism appropriate to such leaks. But based on my own knowledge of the source and who he is speaking with at Palm I consider this information to be the best intelligence available about Palm's current plans.

You hear this fairly often these days from people who track mobile phone usage: "mobile phone consumers don't know or care what operating system their phone runs." It comes up in conversations where someone is fretting about the fact that Handset Company X has dropped System Y or started selling phones with System Z. It also comes up in conversations where people (often developers) are struggling with the fact that most people who buy smartphones never bother to install any 3rd party software on them.

Simon Judge at Mobile Phone Development points to a new survey by Compete Inc. concludes that people are a lot more concerned about the operating system when shopping for a phone than I would have thought. People apparently rate the OS as more important than the camera, email capabilities, bluetooth, or the music player.



I agree with Simon that the term "operating system" here should probably be interpreted as referring more to the UI than the actual OS, i.e. "Nokia S60" or "UIQ" is probably what people mean, not "Symbian" which doesn't have it's own UI. This doesn't necessarily mean that the masses are starting to "get" the fact that many of the phones they buy are mobile computers or that large numbers of them plan to start using them as such (note that email capability isn't high on the list yet). But Compete seems to think that ease of installing and using software is part of it:

As consumers spend more time navigating menus and installing content and programs on their mobile phones, they have become more aware of the role the OS plays in their handset experience....

Over 40% of those who ranked the OS as important said that providing OS choice would significantly increase their usage of data services. Additionally, 20% of this group said they would be willing to switch carriers for the Treo 700, currently only available from Verizon with Windows Mobile OS.

However you want to interpret this, the fact that consumers say they will spend more money for a phone with a particular OS is a step toward's Palm's motto: the future of computing is mobile computing.

I could see no mention from Palm-watchers on the web about the news of a truly gigantic contract for a half-million Windows Mobile smartphones by the US Census Bureau. EWeek reports that this will be the largest single deployment of Windows Mobile devices ever. To put this in perspective, that's about a quarter of Palm's smartphone sales for an entire year. The handsets, made by HTC, are "currently being prototyped by the government, and will be used in a 2008 dress rehearsal for the 2010 [Census] survey."

The reason I kind of expected a Palm fan site to pick this up is that HTC makes the Palm Treo 700w, which is probably the most popular Windows Mobile handset today. But if you're a Palm fan don't get excited on my account: the article says the contract is directly with HTC, not Palm. It sounds like the government may be commissioning a custom handset just for their own use. For a device intended to serve a single purpose this probably makes more sense than ordering up a half-million Treos. The Treos try to be jack-of-all-trade devices that work really well as business phones, email/messaging devices, and PDAs, whereas few of these features would likely be the focus for the Census Bureau. With an order this size (and the soft budget constraints that only governments can have) they may be looking for something with hardware support for Census-specific software. The inclusion of a GPS receiver is a no-brainer. And they probably don't want Minesweeper burned into the ROM.

I've got a whole drawerful of handheld computers and smartphones. I have to buy new ones all the time to support my clients who use them. There are some amazing mobile computers these days, but I have to say that my favorites are the older Palm OS devices with monochrome screens and 68k processors. I enjoy the simplicity, reliability, and long battery life of my Visor Platinum. I'm sure it's partly nostalgia: that's the device I first installed Onboard C on and taught myself Palm programming while riding public transportation to work in Houston. I also think that I've got a penchant for minimalism: how much I can do with a little? I once created and maintained an entire web site with the Visor and a wireless modem to upload pages to the server.

But it's more than this. It's also a pleasure to use a device that does just what you need and nothing more. I just bought a new Tablet PC because I needed a laptop powerful enough to run Eclipse, and it's a great tool. But it's funny: as much as I love gadgets, I can't really seem to get very attached to any kind of PC. They're so generic and multipurposed that they don't seem to have any character. That may sound like a funny thing to ask of a device, but it's how I feel. Don Norman talked about the personality of devices at this year's PalmSource DevCon and I think he is right that well-designed objects have personalities to which we become attached. These personalities get drowned by oceans of features.

Despite the recent Tablet purchase I've been finding myself longing for an Alphasmart Dana. Here's what they look like:

It's a personal computer, but much less. Small and very lightweight, I could use it as a more mobile laptop for writing, emailing, and even doing some light Palm development using Onboard C again. The Dana is often ridiculed for the very things that attract me to it: the monochrome screen, the fact that it runs Palm OS 4, and the oddity of having a full-sized keyboard and Graffiti handwriting recognition. But it seems like it would be much more pleasant to use on a plane than a regular laptop PC. Running for days on a charge and having such a tough case I can even see taking it on a backpacking trip where you wanted to get away and just write. Unlike a laptop PC it's instant on, instant off.

Apparently, I'm not alone in all of this. In fact I was fascinated to find this blog where several commenters went on and on about Alphasmart's even simpler laptop called the Neo, while complaining that the $350 Dana is too expensive and dolled up with stuff they don't want like a Wi-Fi radio and Palm applications. There is a market for simple, narrowly purposed mobile devices. I'm glad to see that Palm OS licensees like Alphasmart and Aceeca (another hero of mine) are continuing to do good business by recognizing this fact.